The Russian fleet, in spite of their superiority, suffered terribly from the desperate defence of the Turks. Several of their vessels, completely dismasted, were obliged to leave Sinope in tow of steamers; and none of them ever did any more service, for after being for a long time blockaded in Sebastopol, by the French and English fleets, they were sunk in that harbor by the Russians themselves.
Although so much of the town was injured by shot and fire, and at least one hundred and fifty of the inhabitants were killed or burned, strange to say, a fine fifty-gun steam-frigate, upon the stocks, escaped destruction. A visitor, soon after the battle, describes the scene as most heart-rending and depressing, and expresses wonder that more of the towns-people were not killed, as the fields, inland, were covered with fragments of the blown up ships, exploded shells, bolts, chains, spars and planks. An anchor weighing fifteen hundred pounds was blown inland more than a quarter of a mile.
LISSA, 1866.
Lissa is an island of the Adriatic, thirty-three miles southwest of Spalatro, in Dalmatia. In ancient times, four centuries before Christ, it was settled by Greeks from Lesbos, who named it Issa, from one of the names of their own island, in the Ægean.
During the first Punic war the Isseans, already expert seamen, helped the Roman Duilius with their beaked ships, and the Great Republic of antiquity in return assisted them in resisting aggression. They were again allies against Philip of Macedon.
In the year 966 the Venetians were in possession of the island, but the Ragusans, from the mainland, drove them out, only to return, and to establish firmly the reign of the Doges. The principal town was twice entirely destroyed, once by the Neapolitans, and once by the Turks, and the present city, which rises in an amphitheatrical form from the shores of the principal harbor, only dates from the year 1571. During the Napoleonic wars the island was occupied by the French, and near it, in 1810, an important naval action was fought, in which an English squadron defeated the French. The English then seized and kept possession of the island until the grand settlement and apportionment, after the peace of 1815, when it became the property of Austria. The fortifications erected by the British were only dismantled in 1870. The island is fertile, quite mountainous, and a conspicuous landmark in the navigation of the Adriatic.
In the course of the war between Austria and Italy, which terminated in the entire liberation of the latter country from the dominion of the hated “Tedeschi,” who had occupied Venice and the fairest parts of Lombardy for so many years, Italy suffered two great defeats. One was on land, at Custozza, where their army, though unsuccessful, came out with honor, after proofs of courage and conduct.
The navy of Italy, then comparatively small and untried, was anxious to redeem the Italian honor and arms, by meeting the Austrian fleet. Under the auspices of the navy a descent was therefore made upon the Austrian island of Lissa.
